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pictured a girl or boy of school age, some smiling with naive seduction, some staring blandly, others frowning, as if annoyed, frightened or suspicious.
    Fabian’s eyes stopped at the photograph of a girl, perhapsfourteen, frail, her eyes expressive, her lips full in a face of Latin intensity. Her black hair, long and gleaming, hung loosely draped over her shoulders; an oversized robe, cinched like a monk’s habit around her boyish waist, shrouded her; a towel dangled over one arm.
    For a moment, Fabian felt the impulse to note down the number and the initials underneath the photograph, and to embark on the road of fatherhood.
    In that moment, he acknowledged he had neither the energy nor the means to follow through. He weighed the page, then reluctantly turned it over. Sliding, it joined the ones that had gone before.
    He drove through the city’s financial district, almost deserted at the close of business, until he found a large, empty parking lot wedged in between skyscrapers mirroring, in the neat rows of spaces, the buildings’ infinity of identical windows. Fabian parked his VanHome so as to block entirely the entrance to the lot. He had now created a field for his horses and his polo. Lowering the rear platform of the VanHome, he drew the two mares out, Gaited Amble briskly sniffing the air, Big Lick capering and prancing, eager for movement.
    Gaited Amble was an American Saddle horse, creamy white with a flat face and small, slender ears. It stood something over five feet at the shoulder, or sixteen hands, as horsemen liked to put it, the neck arching gracefully at a curve not common to any other breed. When Gaited Amble stood motionless, its short back gave the impression of having been abandoned by a heedless or impatient sculptor. Big Lick, a Tennessee Walking horse, was a sharp contrast, just under fifteen hands and jet black, with a patrician muzzle and short, round ears well set on a thick, sturdy neck, its ribs well sprung, giving way to broad, muscular hindquarters.
    Professional polo players, who rode swifter, bolder and more agile Thoroughbreds, were open in their ridicule of Fabian’s ponies. They pointed out that the long curving neck of GaitedAmble obstructed its rider’s view and made hitting the ball, particularly underneath the horse’s neck, difficult. And occasionally when Big Lick broke into a canter or gallop, its old show habits recurred, and it bobbed up and down or swayed to and fro like a wooden horse on a carousel. Fabian took his critics’ disdainful ridicule as casually as did his ponies.
    He had acquired each for a third of their market value only because they repeatedly had failed as show horses. He had retrained them for polo himself, and to keep them accustomed to the speed and rough-and-tumble of the game, rode them whenever he was invited to play.
    But he continued to school them in the gaits they had learned, omitting only the excesses to which they had been subjected in training for show. Gaited Amble, for example, like most other American Saddle horses, had been drilled repeatedly in performing the gaits its breed was celebrated for—a fancy caper, a distinguished trot and its famous amble, that broken, slow pace in which the hoofs hit the ground at predetermined intervals.
    The elegant carriage of the mare had been contrived by cutting the depressor muscles at the base of its tail. The horse had been fitted with a harness that forced the tail to be erect and would not permit the severed muscles to heal; before each show or display the harness was removed and, to enhance even further the pluming jet of the tail, a galling powder was inserted into the anus of the animal. The tail rose to still more exalted height.
    Even after Fabian had come into possession of Gaited Amble and had abandoned the harness, the tail did not soon return to its normal mobility. To protect the horse from flies each time it was let out, Fabian had had to spray it with insect repellent.
    In its